Upper West Side Art Guide
The Upper West Side has always been a neighborhood of big ideas. It’s where the Beat Generation first found each other, where Lennon lived and died, where Chagall put his murals in the opera house and where Keith Haring made his last work. The cultural institutions here — Lincoln Center, the Natural History Museum, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine — are architectural landmarks in their own right, and the public art in Riverside Park and on the Columbia campus rewards anyone willing to wander a few blocks from the main drags of Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue.
1. Lincoln Center
65th Street and Columbus Avenue
Lincoln Center was built for the 1964–1965 World’s Fair era and opened in stages through the 1960s, replacing a neighborhood of tenements that had been cleared through urban renewal — the same block immortalized, with no small bitterness, in West Side Story. The complex is one of the largest performing arts centers in the world, and it’s loaded with significant art.
The Metropolitan Opera House contains two enormous Marc Chagall murals, The Triumph of Music and The Sources of Music, visible from the plaza through the opera house’s tall glass facade. Chagall painted both in his Paris studio in 1966 and had them shipped over — the murals, which fill the arched windows flanking the lobby, continue his signature vocabulary of floating figures, musicians, and animals in radiant color. Chagall had a long relationship with opera; he also painted the ceiling of the Paris Opera and designed set murals for The Magic Flute in New York.
In the lobby of the David H. Koch Theater — home of the New York City Ballet — hangs Lee Bontecou’s 1964. Bontecou’s works are simultaneously painting and sculpture: steel frames stretched with recycled canvas, often from conveyor belts and mail sacks rather than fine artist’s linen. The pieces are non-representational but feel vaguely mechanical and slightly ominous, like space-age machinery or weapons with an organic core. 1964 was made at the height of Bontecou’s career while she was showing at Leo Castelli’s gallery.
Underground, at the 66th Street station on the 1 train, Nancy Spero’s glass mosaics line the walls. Called Artemis, Acrobats, Divas and Dancers, the series depicts performers from Lincoln Center’s stages in Spero’s characteristically flat, energetic style. Spero, who died in 2009, was a feminist artist and activist, and a founding member of A.I.R. Gallery in Soho — the first artist-run cooperative gallery for women in the United States.
2. The Dakota
1 West 72nd Street
The Dakota was built in 1884 and designed by Henry Hardenbergh — the same architect who would go on to design the Plaza Hotel and Andy Warhol’s townhouse on Lexington Avenue. The building’s name reportedly came from its remote location: when it was built, the Upper West Side was so undeveloped that colleagues joked it might as well be in the Dakotas. The address became legendary through its residents: Lauren Bacall, Leonard Bernstein, Boris Karloff, Judy Garland, Gilda Radner, and most famously, John Lennon and Yoko Ono. On December 8, 1980, Lennon was shot and killed just outside the building’s 72nd Street entrance by Mark David Chapman. Earlier that same day, Annie Leibovitz had photographed the couple for Rolling Stone — the image of Lennon curled around Ono became one of the most reproduced photographs of the 20th century. Strawberry Fields, the memorial garden across 72nd Street in Central Park, was dedicated to Lennon’s memory in 1985. Yoko Ono still lives in the building.
3. Riverside Park Sculpture Walk
Riverside Drive, 72nd to 120th Streets
Riverside Park, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and opened in 1875, stretches along the Hudson River for four miles. Two sculptures in particular are worth seeking out.
At the 72nd Street entrance, Penelope Jencks’ bronze Eleanor depicts Eleanor Roosevelt perched atop a large rough-cut boulder, looking out over the park from a spot that was once a highway on-ramp. Dedicated in 1996 by Hillary Clinton, it was the first statue of an American woman commissioned for a New York City park. Roosevelt sits in her signature manner — coat on, head slightly bowed, completely unglamorous, completely recognizable.
Further uptown, at Riverside Drive and 115th Street, the park carries a darker piece of literary history. It was here, in August 1944, that Lucien Carr — a Columbia student and the magnetic center of the group that would become the Beats — stabbed and killed David Kammerer, his obsessive pursuer, and weighed the body with rocks before dumping it in the river. Carr had met William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac in quick succession at Columbia, and the murder rippled through all of them: Burroughs and Kerouac co-wrote a fictionalized account, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks; Kerouac returned to it in Vanity of Duluoz; Ginsberg drafted a version and was talked out of publishing it by a Columbia professor. The park bench and river path look exactly as they would have then.
4. Cathedral of St. John the Divine
1047 Amsterdam Avenue at 112th Street
The Cathedral of St. John the Divine is the largest cathedral in the world by interior volume — St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome is larger, but technically isn’t a cathedral. Construction began in 1892 and, famously, has never been fully completed. The cathedral is known for its interfaith tradition, its commitment to contemporary art, and programming that has always reached beyond the strictly religious.
Inside, near the high altar, hangs Keith Haring’s The Life of Christ — a massive bronze triptych, five feet by eight feet, finished in white gold leaf. Haring made it in January 1990, one month before his death from AIDS-related complications at age 31. The piece shows scenes from the life of Christ rendered in Haring’s signature figures: the bold outlines, the simplified bodies, the unmistakable visual language he’d developed on subway platforms and gallery walls. But the mood here is different from the joyful energy of his street work. The piece feels urgent and angry, the figures moving with flailing arms and clenched fists — understandable, given when it was made. It is an edition of nine, with two artist’s proofs; other casts are in museum collections. This is arguably the right home for it.
Outside, in the cathedral grounds, Greg Wyatt’s Peace Fountain was cast in 1985 to mark the 200th anniversary of the Diocese of New York. The sculpture is wildly, gloriously strange: Archangel Michael embracing a giraffe, animals intertwined with a giant man in the moon, a DNA double helix woven through the composition, crab claws at the base, and the upside-down head of Satan at the bottom — all of which surrounds a fountain basin that contains no actual water. It reads like something from a Hieronymus Bosch painting, a late-16th-century allegory of good and evil dropped into a 20th-century ecclesiastical garden. The fountain is ringed by small bronze figures of philosophers and writers designed by local schoolchildren.
5. Columbia University
116th Street and Broadway
Columbia’s main quad, McKim, Mead & White’s grand Beaux Arts campus completed in 1897, contains one of New York’s overlooked public sculpture treasures. In front of Philosophy Hall stands a cast of Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker — one of eight bronzes cast directly by Rodin himself, given to the university in 1930. The original figure was designed as the centerpiece of Rodin’s Gates of Hell, meant to represent Dante contemplating the poem. It migrated through several symbolic meanings over the decades: a symbol of socialism in early 20th-century France, when it was installed at the Pantheon during a period of social unrest; later a general symbol of intellectual life; and of course, always, the universal image of a man thinking very hard on the toilet. This copy predates all those associations — Rodin made it himself.
The university’s literary history is equally dense. In the early 1940s, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac all converged at or near Columbia — Kerouac on a football scholarship, Ginsberg to study law, Burroughs simply to be in New York. The common thread was Lucien Carr, who drew them together and then held them in orbit through personality alone. Near the campus at Revson Plaza (Amsterdam Avenue and 118th Street), R. Kees Verkade’s Tight Rope Walker — a 14-foot bronze of one figure balanced on another’s shoulders — has stood since 1979 on the bridge above the street, one hand outstretched over the traffic.
6. American Museum of Natural History
79th Street and Central Park West
The AMNH is one of the largest natural history museums in the world, and its Romanesque Revival exterior — all fortress-like towers and red brick — has been looming over the park since 1877. The Roosevelt Rotunda, with its mounted Barosaurus rearing up to protect its young from an Allosaurus, remains one of the great entrance halls in New York. Beyond paleontology and anthropology, the museum contains a notable piece of contemporary sculpture: Santiago Calatrava’s New York Times Capsule, a twisted silver form resembling an abstract infinity sign, commissioned in 1999 and designed to remain sealed until the year 3000. Calatrava was chosen through an open competition; his design — simultaneously an engineering object and an artwork — reflects the aesthetic that also produced his wing-like transportation hub at the World Trade Center. The capsule’s contents, sealed in full view of museum visitors, include items curated from around the world alongside the archives of the New York Times Magazine and hair samples from multiple donors, including Dolly the cloned sheep.
7. Marcel Duchamp’s Studio at 33 West 67th Street
33 West 67th Street
In 1915, Marcel Duchamp fled Europe at the declaration of World War I and moved into a studio on West 67th Street owned by arts patrons Walter and Louise Arensberg. Rather than pay rent, he traded the Arensbergs his work — including The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, now known as The Large Glass, currently in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The studio on 67th Street is where Duchamp created Fountain in 1917: a standard Bedfordshire model urinal from the J. L. Mott Iron Works, onto which he inscribed “R.Mutt 1917” and submitted to the Society of Independent Artists’ exhibition — which rejected it. The Arensbergs remained lifelong friends and supporters. Duchamp returned to New York in 1920 and lived for a time at 246 West 73rd Street before eventually settling downtown, where he worked secretly on Étant Donnés until his death in 1968. The 67th Street building still stands, looking like the other residential buildings on the block, with no indication of what was made inside.
The Upper West Side doesn’t announce its art history the way Museum Mile does. A lot of it is embedded in buildings that look like residential buildings, in parks that look like parks, in a cathedral that never quite finished being built. That’s part of what makes the neighborhood interesting — the density of what happened here is out of proportion to how quiet it looks.